“The History of Problems in Painting”

— Peter Dreher, interview by Lynne Tillman (Bomb, LVII, 1996)

David Cass has expressed his interest in the work of Peter Dreher (1932-2020), principally known for the dedication with which he painted, daily and on a small scale, an ordinary glass of water, rendered in grays and whites. Dreher said this helped establish his bond with painters thousands of years before him, whose painting demanded great concentration rather than a constant metamorphosis of form.

Cass likewise often paints the same motif, a network of flowing lines that signifies the movement of water. In his case, there are many variables, such as the size and shape of the field on which he paints, as well as the material he uses as ground (here we see works upon wood, but Cass has also used metal, plastic-waste, glass, card and paper). Like an opposite to dust, Cass’ lines accrete on aged surfaces, establishing a dialogue between past and present, functional objects and art. The traditional hierarchical distinction between support surface and paint is startlingly absent.

The ongoing theme is our changed position with respect to nature: ours is the first epoch in which the natural world has been seen as a problem, as itself in danger. Not only is Cass’ art not dedicated to self-expression, but the very centrality of self is challenged as the pressing problems of rising sea levels, desertification, and all the other implications of climate change threaten what had seemed stable modes of life. Water is both universal and endlessly particularized, both natural and highly politicized, crucial to understanding our historical moment and also a share of something eternal, flat and yet flexible, contained and yet ever-moving, monochrome though at other times chameleon of color. Cass has worked to abstract visual correlates, always honoring the found artefact as well as alluding to threats to nature and us with it. In this period after modernity, Cass’ art addresses implicit disquiet about the future, an opposite to the early confidence of modernists in the machine age. His ruminative process produces a reassuring object, a kind of adaptable relic that bonds past, present, and future, all the while pervaded by the theme of fragility. The uniqueness of the object often owes as much or more to the support or to collage than to the painted marks, which like a melody have a common substructure despite their many variations. His visual language has consistency but no inviolable boundaries. Meditative for both maker and viewer, it distills light into line, not in any attempt to render an idea of perfection, but to harmonize art and science into an abstract vision of balance between two entities that are not opposites, like water and sky. The colors are usually blue-green and white, often with the subtle glow of wood as ground, or bits of rusty red. The support is never neutral; the paint is never brash. Those varied yet constant patterns of shimmering waves, a sight resolutely resistant to photography, stay in our minds like the wavelets of Canaletto, which both refer to water and have a beauty of their own.

Sometimes the horizon is key: an implacable, insistent horizontal line. The horizon, so often muted in the art of earlier eras to make it recede properly, has here become a clarion call, a marker of a proportionality that is under threat. Whether through the horizon line or by expanding and contracting the web of wave lines, Cass establishes a pictorial perspective without a vanishing point, made of curves rather than straight lines, a pictorial world in which the horizon functions as a reminder of fluctuation rather than as a trace of a comforting infinity. And regularly, beneath the paint like a bass line, the theme of sustainability is made present through the repurposed material.

Cass has also cited the work of Roger Ackling (1947-2014), work which used detritus in the great tradition introduced to the British Isles by Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948). Ackling found driftwood on the Norfolk coast and used a magnifying lens to focus the light of the sun on the wood, thereby patiently allowing the sun to burn patterns into the surface, like some recreation of a primitive art form. Ackling, like Dreher, moved the painstaking process of artmaking away from the dominant styles of late modernism toward something serious but resolutely not pretentious, evincing a kind of deference toward material and imagery that licensed a more contemplative approach to the object, both by artist and viewer. The sea, tumultuous and variable as it can be, is also a place we turn for calm. It is ever new and ever the same, and painting it likewise. In Cass’ words, “I paint sea because it grounds me: the process is a study in patience, offering the hours of inner quiet Dreher spoke of.”

Cass shares with Ackling an inveterate fascination with artful salvage, having committed considerable time combing flea markets around Europe, searching for surfaces that would allow for a symbiosis with his own vision, a layering that was not so much of personal mental recesses as of abstractly apprehended times and persons. Quietly radical, Cass’ art incorporates the activity of collecting into the process of making, so that the function of the artist for once utterly displaces the Romantic prototype of the wildman with the bravura brush, and becomes instead a sort of everyman, a Robinson Crusoe scavenging in order to build a new and stripped down life, an aesthetically curious Claude Lévi-Strauss walking through an apparently disordered landscape and finding structure there, an Erasmus, a citizen of the world who can be at home wherever there is water, wood, and weakening memory.

He has most consistently painted upon wooden boxes or drawer bases, made collage with old envelopes and scraps, and often, used old matchboxes as a convenient mini-machine of moving parts, in which card, paper, ink, and watercolor can transform a small quotidian design marvel into a vessel of succinct communication, by which opposites are made into a whole: waves of water on a fire-making device, an almost-obsolete, once common convenience made into a reminder of our present-day plight. Modernism, which came to seem soullessly antiseptic, is displaced by a determination to salvage from the past for the sake of a poetical connection, weighty without being sentimental. Usually these links are with places or with persons functionally anonymous, although in a handful of cases Cass has painted upon inherited objects, once etching upon his grandfather’s school slate. Instead of the isolated individual of modernism, we get the modesty of layered presences, and a sense of selective continuity modernists never sought, if only because they never conceived of continuity that didn’t involve celebrity. By basing his work consistently on wood and water, Cass co-opts their patterns of endless repetition in infinite variation. Wood grain and water, both redolent of time’s passage, visually connote both continuity and endless change. By painting on something old, especially by painting on wood with its natural evidence of agedness, he co-opts patina and makes it sub-surface for his brush.

At present, Cass works between London and his native Scotland, though the imagery and the surfaces for that imagery are garnered from many places. Since 2013—and the exhibition Years of Dust & Dry—Cass has produced work in southern Spain, on the theme of aridness; as well as contributing to Charity:Water, with funds from the sale of work being dedicated to the supply of clean water in developing countries. He commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the devasting November 1966 flood in Florence with a series of works and the volume Perimeti Perduti, the subject of an exhibition at the British Institute of Florence. He followed up with a Venetian series—Pelàda—often painting the city’s typical house numbers and signage, combining oils and collage, allowing parts to signify the whole, often in the typical hues, mustards and dusty reds (near complements to the blue he often uses), of the domestic buildings of Venice, supported by those aging, submerged 60-foot-long wood piles. Among his current projects is a collaboration with Joseph Calleja, Austin Camilleri and the late Robert Callender, following up on the 2019 exhibition As Coastline is to Ocean, for which Cass’ work, often using found materials to make relief sculpture, abstractly explores the idea of water and snow as reflective surfaces crucial to fluctuations in atmospheric temperature. He is working with oceanographer John Englander on a photography project, Ocean Rising*, scheduled for completion in 2021, and previously collaborated both with Englander and with David Reay, professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, on Rising Horizon. His lens-based work has been exhibited in Europe as well as in Turkey and Tasmania.

*Ocean Rising has since been re-routed, now titled The Sea from Here, the project features other people’s images of sea, accompanied by text from Englander.

Although Cass often employs a fairly small, fairly dry brush, and has a preference for wood as his ground, with its rich grains, the techniques are less defining than a sense of the open possibilities of art in the twenty-first century. His is an art that must address the urgency of our fundamentally changed, now perilous connection to the natural world—an art which at the same time is in many ways less constrained than those of our predecessors, being free to explore the potential of ordinary materials reworked and arranged without obtrusive mannerisms of brushwork, but instead with a characteristic deftness, whether on a miniature or mural scale. Cass makes art in the first place by collecting, as we all do, in one way or another, and then by turning a practical object into an occasion for meditation, something we all need, to some degree or another. In its dedication to the qualities of patience and concentration, Cass’ art has something of medieval practice in it, though in its predilection for the flotsam and jetsam of antique shops and attics, seasoned with years of service as well as years of neglect, it shares in a moment that newly questions the long-term consequences of unrestrained consumerism.

Selected
Artworks

2011—2020

As Ackling said of his own practice, he was “always making the same work”, and yet the works were easily distinguishable, so Cass, too, recurs to the web of flowing waves. He continually explores line both as border and as connection, and searches for grounds, for surfaces that can provide palimpsests, reminding us of the limits of the present. In achieving a new relationship between paint and ground, he has made a visual analogue for the common human experience of seeking to place the mercurial present upon the substructure of the past, to have at least a semblance of being able to exert ourselves upon what came before, rather than seeing ourselves as passive inheritors. What else could freedom be?

Thank you to Patricia Emison – author, art historian and professor of Art & Art History at the University of New Hampshire, USA. The author of several books on the Italian Renaissance, including The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Leonardo (Phaidon Colour Library), her forthcoming Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History is to be published by Amsterdam University Press (due 2021). Emison has previously produced text for Perimetri Perduti and Pelàda.